Wednesday, March 6, 2019

What is the title of your autobiography?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the name of your autobiography?

I've edited to remove students' names; this means some titles are fully expurgated, since a lot of people were not satisfied with a byline and needed to include their name in the title of their own autobiography:

  • [name]'s shared thoughts
  • My autobiography
  • [name]? More like [pun on name]
  • [joke about first name]
  • [joke about last name and studiousness]
  • [pun about name]
  • [joke about name's pronunciation]
  • [name]'s book
Only one person self-aggrandized with "A Great American Novel"; many people went the other direction:
  • Why am I like this
  • I wrote some words here
  • That Berpy Specy Person
  • I smell
  • a guy does stuff and has fun (maybe)
Some people only loosely followed the prompt, and their replies mostly reflected what they were thinking about during this lecture on Turing machines and finite automata:
  • Am I a finite automaton? Why I'm so forgetful??
  • I should NEVER have taken 5 classes in one semester
  • TM: Nobody wants ALL The Details
Several students's titles followed a theme:
  • How to sleep + eat a ton
  • How to sleep more + eat a sh*t ton
  • How I sleepwalked through life
  • Life Goal: sleep like a kindergarten kid
The cutest one by far was today's winner: Existential Mathematician: Always Looking for "y". (To see previous students' replies to this question, go here.)


This post's theme word is lection (n), "a version of a text in a particular copy or edition; a selection read in a religious service (aka a pericope)." The second printing lection of my autobiography contained a number of typos; the publisher would like to apologize for the particularly egregious typos on the cover, including the author's name.

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